The coffee and pie return in ‘Twin Peaks, Part 16’

Never can say goodbye: Kyle MacLachlan and Naomi Watts in a scene from Part 16 of Showtime's "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Never can say goodbye: Kyle MacLachlan and Naomi Watts in a scene from Part 16 of Showtime's "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi view a massacre in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Robert Knepper and Jim Belushi view a massacre in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Pierce Gagnon and Don Murray in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Kyle MacLachlan, Naomi Watts, Pierce Gagnon and Don Murray in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Eddie Vedder, lead singer of The Pearl Jam, plays at the Roadhouse in Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Eddie Vedder, lead singer of The Pearl Jam, plays at the Roadhouse in Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Laura Dern as Diane in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Laura Dern as Diane in a still from Part 16 of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME, Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

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Sherilyn Fenn does her dance in a scene from "Part 16" of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Sherilyn Fenn does her dance in a scene from "Part 16" of "Twin Peaks: The Return."

Photo: Suzanne Tenner/SHOWTIME

The coffee and pie return in ‘Twin Peaks, Part 16’

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Dale Cooper is 100 percent back.

That plot leap, by itself, would have been enough to make my Sunday night of “Twin Peaks.” But “Part 16” gains its true power by the amount of long-standing suspicions it tragically confirms: The rape of Diane (Laura Dern) at the hands of Mr. C (Kyle MacLachlan); the vile Dick Horne (Eamon Farren) is the offspring of Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) and Mr. C; Audrey’s mental degradation; and the farewell of Cooper/Dougie Jones (MacLachlan) to “wife” Janey-E (Naomi Watts) and their Sonny Jim.

“Part 16’s” pileup of nostalgic satisfactions makes one forget it started off pretty normally—that is, pretty “TP: The Return”-ish—that is, beautifully monotonous and circular. The waiting game was at its most dramatic in the Las Vegas scenes of the Douglas Jones house, where the hit couple Chantal and Hutch (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth—who act as if they just left an early Tarantino film) are waiting to shoot’n’kill Dougie Jones. Chantal eats Cheetos bags, Hutch asks if she’s “on the rag,” she screams “WHAT IF I F—IN’ WAS?!D,” a Polish accountant gets angry that the Tarantinans are in his driveway, and he murders them with a semi-automatic gun. As the Mitchum Brothers (Robert Knepper, Jim Belushi) watch in horror, one of them asks: “The f-ck kind of neighborhood is this?” The other responds: “People are under a lot of stress, Bradley.” The only thing that would top this baroque humor would be Lynch’s Gordon Cole yelling, “NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL ROAD RAGE.”

Meanwhile, Lynch pays tribute to French comic auteur Jacques Tati’s fear of modern technology with unsettling cuts between Gordon Cole staring at FBI machinery and Dougie (in his Billy Wilder-induced coma) hooked up to a similarly sinister hospital machine. I love these in-between moments—because they seem so random and unimportant, yet have a definite source in the artist’s artist.

Of course, the biggest reason to talk about “Part 16” is its return to ‘90s TV classicism. For the majority of this season, Lynch has held off giving the audience two things it desires—namely, a Dale Cooper who delivers snappy niceties and Angelo Badalmenti’s richly nostalgic music. “Part 16” gave us all that. The season’s masterful flaunting of expectations gives in to the inevitable (maybe now boring?) payoffs.

The most disturbing of these payoffs are the two completely different scenes of a Cooper father saying goodbye to his son. In the case of Mr. C, he gleefully and knowingly sends Dick Horne to his electric death on a desert rock (back to join Killer BOB?). Horne’s violent screams of pain are offset by Mr. C’s key topper: “Goodbye, my son.”

Meanwhile, Dale Cooper, now having regained consciousness, realizes he must leave behind his fake family, so he hugs Sonny Jim (Pierce Gagnon) long and tight and refuses to let go. He wouldn’t be a decent, moral Coop if he didn’t make an extra “seed” (clone) of himself—presumably to keep Janey-E and Sonny Jim company. It’s a very Lynchian refraction on Ray Bradbury’s “Twilight Zone” episode “I Sing the Body Electric”—so weird and sad.

The difference between these father-son goodbyes is night and day. Here, we get the clearest indication of what’s at stake next week: Bad Coop or Good Coop’s way of ‘tough love’? “Wild at Heart” shenaniganry or “Fire Walk with Me” seriousness?

But the most harrowing moment in “Part 16,” by far, was Diane’s confession. Here, Dern’s history with Lynch (“Blue Velvet,” “Inland Empire”) and Lynch’s concern about sexual violence against women (the only kind of Lynchian violence that never veers into funny aw-shucks territory) reached a cosmic climax. As Diane described her rape at the hands of Mr. C (or, as she more horrifyingly puts it, “Cooper”), Dern’s quasi-campy “Blue Velvet” cry-face revealed its raw brutality. Here, Dians becomes less like her bitter “New Twin Peaks” self and more and more like an “Old Twin Peaks” sheriff: putty-like emotions, an exaggerated face, soap-ish delivery of lines—all very genuine. It’s painful when Diane says “I’m not me” over and over again, as some force (Mr. C?) compels her to reach for her gun and take aim at Gordon Cole. (Albert and Tammy Preston shoot Diane down, sending her back to the Red Room, revealing her to be a “tulpa,” a sort of doubled being from Tibetan spiritualism.)

New “Twin Peaks” is full of lots of folks who are “manufactured” or “not themselves.” Though it’s never explicitly said, Amy Shiels’ glaze-eyed Candie qualifies as more ‘thing’ than ‘person.’ Same with Cooper/Douglas Jones, Dick Horne, Audrey, and the new Truman brother. Like the people in a Jacques Tati film (“Playtime,” “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday”), they feel like cogs in a beautiful machine, a machine that doubles as the exacting camera which only allows people to strictly adhere to the rigorous aesthetic demands of their creator, the auteur. Only Lynch’s worlds are not nearly as warm, serene, or humanist at Tati’s.

But Tati and Lynch are connected in their use of a music-before-our-time to sonically anchor the viewers, for however brief a time, before modernity kicks in. Tati’s accordions and wistful toy-pianos grace the soundtracks of all six of his feature-length masterpieces. In 1967’s “Playtime,” a raucous night at a restaurant sheds several skins of music before arriving at the kind that Tati loves most: Aged yet heartfelt French ballads from before the war. Likewise, Lynch’s career has been a lifelong attempt to preserve the 50s and 60s pop culture in which he grew up. Everyone loves Roy Orbison, Nicolas Cage is Elvis, Julee Cruise is rockin’ back inside her heart, Big Ed and Norma feel the pulse of Otis Redding, and Isabella Rossellini wears blue velvet (boom boom).

But now in the ending to “Part 16”, the ’90s (when Lynch made his ascent) have become just as valid and old a throwback. It’s 1991 at the Roadhouse: Eddie Vedder is on stage playing the acoustic and haunting “Out of Sand,” with the same hushed concentration he gained from front-manning The Pearl Jam. (“Ten,” their debut album, was released August 27, 1991. “I’ll hear you again in 26 years”?) When Audrey and Charlie (Clark Middleton) finally make it to the Roadhouse, and Badalamenti’s “Audrey’s Dance” kicks in with its woozy sax and finger-snaps, the scene suddenly resembles a bizarro cover of the music video to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” The mosh-pit is now a sea of stiff millennials swaying back and forth, but the watery camera and clipped editing remain the same.

At this point, Badalementi’s music announces its own “Twin Peaks” return. He has only crafted two major themes for the new season: “Heartbreaking” and “The Chair”, both rather similar in their sorrow. So hearing the classic themes all at once is a joy to sore ears.

It takes me back to the beginning of the episode, where I had a violent revelation: Next week will be the last chance to see and hear those opening credits for the first time. Until this week, I’ve become so impatient to see what happens in the episode that I haven’t been paying attention to that crucial opening, to which I used to religiously pay attention all the way through. Even the creditstell the story of absence and decay that is “The Return.” The “Falling” theme is truncated. What used to be a long list of characters (ah, the days of Jack Nance, Ray Wise, and Piper Laurie as “K”atherine Martell) is now an impersonal, clipped brief of the most important creators. The new opening credits have a rushed helicopter-like weightlessness, nothing like the 3-minute-long slowness of the birds, buzz-saws, and waterfalls that patiently distilled “Twin Peaks” to its essence.